Random thoughts and a dash of .NET: May 2005

Website updates

Just uploaded a bunch of updates to www.jamesfitzsimons.com tonight. There are a few new travelling pages including our trips to Wales, Oxford and Oslo. I will be putting up our Prague photos soon (once I label them!) and will no doubt be taking a bunch of pics this weekend in Seville so keep an eye out for more updates in the near future.

Episode III and ... Success!

Well, it's been a pretty good weekend and I've just got home from Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, which I can report is actually quite good and grateful departure from the rubbish that has been Episodes I and II. Hayden Christensen manages to display slightly more emotion than a block of wood in this movie, and the final scenes as he makes his transition to become Lord Vader are really quite cool.

I can happily report that I have finally cracked the rotation problem that has been holding me up on the vision system. I can now estimate camera ego motion between frames which is a vital part of the SLAM process. Hopefully some time this week I will have the system actually running properly with the two cameras and prove that it all works.

Anthea and I are off to Seville this coming weekend so I should go start learning some spanish... adiós!

Fun weekend but still stuck

Anthea and I had a fun weekend with a trip to Leads castle and some wine tasting at the oldest winery in Kent (yeah, apparently the English make wine ;-) leads castle was great. It has really beautiful grounds and the castle itself is very pretty and we managed to conquer the maze which was fun. They also had about 20 or so birds of prey sitting out on their perches waiting for the falconry display at 1:30 (which we missed unfortunately) and it was really cool to see some of these magnificent birds up close.

I received a little parcel from Amazon on Friday. I've finally got my second camera so should be doing real stereo vision soon. I am still COMPLETELY stuck on deriving the rotation from two sets of points using least squares however. I have a set of 3d co-ordinates which represent a set of features observed at time t1, and then I have another set of 3d co-ordinates which represent the same features at time t2. What I am trying to do is establish the translation and rotation of the camera platform between time t1 and t2. The translation is easy, but the rotation is giving me a real headache! I know I need to use a least squares minimisation, but the actual implementation escapes me. It is getting pretty annoying now too as this has held me up for a couple of weeks now. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this knows how to do this can you please contact me!

Ah well, back to reading Math world and my perpetual state of confusion :-/